César Paternosto and Cecilia Vicuña: DIS SOLVING: threads of water and light

The Drawing Center's collaborative exhibition project incorporated drawings by César Paternosto and a site-specific work by Cecilia Vicuña, grounded in the connection between the legacies of abstraction in Western modernism and Andean and other cultures. The artists' "visual conversation" lasted the duration of the installations' stay at The Drawing Center, with Paternosto's drawings "disappearing," while Vicuña's colored thread cropped up in response. A press release from The Drawing Center stated that "the exhibition rewards the return viewer.”

Paternosto, a pioneer of radical abstraction in Latin America in the late 1960s, challenged the easel painting as an exclusive Western cultural artifact, and prompted a reevaluation of the value of using a frontal static view in painting. His study of archetypal geometric forms in non-Western cultures led to a recognition of the grid as the departing stage of abstraction, an understanding that was evident in the artist's work in DIS SOLVING: threads of water and light. Vicuña began her work with threads in the mid-sixties, constructing unannounced installations in the streets and on the beaches of Chile, the unspun wool a metaphor for the life force, transformation and dissolution. By the closing of the exhibition, the artists' work had meshed into an ethereal grid.